Chapter V: Book ONE: East (2)

Leah, the eldest girl, had her courtships too. The match-makers were busy with her, and a number of men, young and old, were brought to view her. She was dressed up to look fine, and Jacob and Golda would sit together to inspect the suitors, and at last they chose a huge, ugly Russian Jew, named Moscowitsch--Abraham Moscowitsch, a timber-merchant, who had pulled himself up out of the East End and had a house at Hackney. He was a friend of Kuit's and was willing to take the girl without a dowry. Leah hid herself away and wept. It was in vain that Golda, primed by Jacob, told her that she would be rich, and would have servants and carriages, and could buy at the great shops: she could not forget the Russian's bristling hair and thick lips and coarse, splayed nostrils. The tears were of no avail; the marriage had been offered and accepted. The wedding was fixed, and nothing was spared to make it a social triumph. The bride was decked out in conventional English white, with a heavy veil and a bouquet: and very lovely she looked. Jacob wore his first frock-coat and a white linen collar, Golda had a dress made of mauve cashmere, with a bodice heavily adorned with shining beads, and Mendel had a new sailor suit with a mortar-board cap. There were three carriages to drive the party the twenty yards to the synagogue. The wedding group was photographed, and a hall was taken for the feast and the dance in the evening. The wedding cost Jacob the savings of many years and more, but he grudged not a penny of it, because he had a rich son-in-law and wished it to be known. There were over fifty guests at the feast.

Within a week Leah came home again, pale, thin, and shrunken. Moscowitsch had been arrested. He had gone bankrupt and had done "something with his books."

"Bankrupt!" said Jacob; "bankrupt!"

He stood in front of his weeping daughter and beat against the air with his clenched fists. She moaned and protested that she would never go back to him. Jacob shook her till her teeth chattered together.

"You dare talk like that! He is your husband. You are his wife. It is a misfortune. You should be with the lawyers to find out when you can see him. I am to lose everything because he is unfortunate! A dog will not turn from a man in his misery, and must a woman learn from a dog? You are a soft girl! Go, I say, and find out when you can see him. Was ever a man so crossed by Fate! Where I go, there luck takes wings."

His violence shook Leah out of the dazed misery in which she had come home, having no other idea, no other place to which to go. Jacob was at first for making his daughter wait in her new home until her husband was returned to her. His simple imagination seized on the idea and visualized it. It seemed to him admirable, and Golda had hard work to shake it out of his head. As a piece of unnecessary cruelty he could not realize it, but when it was brought home to him that he would have to pay the rent of the house in Hackney, he yielded and allowed the girl to stay at home.

Moscowitsch was sentenced to six months' imprisonment, and a gloom, such as not the darkest days of poverty had been able to create, descended upon the house. Jacob was ashamed and irritable. He insisted upon the most scrupulous observance of all the rites of his religion, and he forbade Mendel to paint. Painting had nothing to do with religion and he would have none of it. He trampled on Mendel's friendship with Artie Beech. The Christian world of police and judges and the law had destroyed his happiness, and not the faintest smell of Christendom should cross his door. Friction between the father and his two sons was exasperated, and it seemed to Mendel that Hell was let loose. He was nearly of an age to leave school, and he dreamed by the hour of the freedom he would have when he went to work. He would go out early in the morning and come home late in the evening. He would stay in the streets and look at the shops and watch the girls go by. He would go one day out beyond London to see what the world was like there. He would find a place where there were pictures, and he would feast on them: for when he went to work he would paint no more, since painting would be shed with the miserable childhood that was so fast slipping away from him.

Yet a worse calamity was to happen. Once again the Christian world of police, law, and judges was to invade the home of the Kühlers, and this time it was Jacob himself who was taken. He was charged with receiving stolen goods. A detective-inspector and two constables invaded the house and took possession of an ormolu clock, a number of silver knives, and a brooch which Mr. Kuit had given to Golda. Five of Mr. Kuit's friends had been arrested, but Mr. Kuit himself was not implicated. He paid for the defence of the prisoners and took charge of the Kühler family, transferred the business into Issy's name, and advanced money to keep it going. He spared neither time nor trouble to try to establish Jacob's innocence, but it looked almost as though some one else was taking an equal amount of trouble to prove his guilt, for every move of Mr. Kuit's was countered, and Jacob himself was so bewildered and enraged that he could not give a coherent answer to the questions put to him. He babbled and raved of an enemy who had done this thing, of a rival who had plotted his ruin, but as he could not give a satisfactory account of the articles found in his possession, his passionate protestations and his fanatical belief in his own honesty were of no avail. From the dock in which he was placed with Mr. Kuit's other friends he delivered a vehement harangue in broken English, not more than ten words of which were intelligible to the judge and jury. The judge was kindly, the jury somnolent. Jacob was the only member of the party with a clean record, and he received the light sentence of eighteen months; the rest had double that term and more. In the Sunday papers they were described as a dangerous gang, and their portraits were drawn like profiles on a coin by an artist whose business it was to make villains look villainous for the delectation of the sober millions who tasted the joys of wickedness only in print. Golda was staggered by the blank indifference of the world to her husband's honesty. His word to her was law, but the judge and the newspapers swept it aside, and he was regarded as one with the wicked men whose crooked dealings had involved the innocent. This was the worst disaster that had ever broken upon her: husband and son-in-law both swept away from her, as it seemed now, in one moment. The sympathy she received from the neighbours touched her profoundly, and she accepted their view that the sudden abstraction of male relatives was a natural calamity, like sickness or fire. Thanks to Mr. Kuit the business would be kept together, and thanks to Abramovich she never lacked company. That faithful friend would come in in the evenings and go over the trial, every moment of which he had heard, and recount every word of Jacob's speech, which to him was a piece of magnificent oratory. "Not a tear was left in my eyes," he said. "Not a throb was left in my heart, and the judge was moved, for his face sank into his hands and I could see that he knew how unjust he must be." And he spent many days ferreting out a villain to be the cause of it all, some inveterate, implacable enemy who had plotted the downfall of the most honest man in London. He fixed on a certain Mr. Rosenthal, who years ago had tried to sell them machines for the business when they had already bought all that were necessary. He was quite sure it was Mr. Rosenthal who had bribed the thieves to hold their tongues, when any one of them could have cleared Jacob in a moment. And Golda believed that it was Mr. Rosenthal and dreamed of unattainable acts of revenge.

Mendel used to listen to them talking, and their voices seemed to him to come from very far away. The upheaval had stunned him, had destroyed his volition and paralysed his dreams. He felt as though a tight band were fixed round his head. He had neither desire nor will. The world could do as it liked with him. If the world could suddenly invade his home and brand its head and lawgiver as thief, then the world was empty and foolish and it did not matter what happened. It amazed him that his brothers and sisters could go about as usual: that Harry could come home and talk of prize-fighters and sit writing to girls, and that Issy could go out to meet his Rosa at the corner of the street. It was astonishing that his mother could still cook and they could still eat, and that every morning Harry could go down and open the door to let in the workpeople to clatter up the stairs. . . . And Harry disliked getting out of bed in the morning. In his father's absence he ventured to apply his considerable ingenuity to the problem, and rigged up a wire from his bed to the knob of the front-door. Nor was this the only sign of the removal of the centre of authority from the family, for Issy actually brought his girl Rosa to the house and made his mother be pleasant to her. . . . Golda felt that her children were growing beyond her, and she thought it was time Issy was thinking of getting married, though not to Rosa, whose father was a poor cobbler and could give her no money.

At regular intervals. Golda swallowed down her dread of the busy streets and went to Pentonville, where through the bars of the visitors'-room Jacob received her report and gave his instructions. He decreed against Rosa, who accordingly was forbidden to enter the house again. He had orders for every one of his children except Mendel, as to whom Golda did not consult him. Deep in her inmost heart she was in revolt against her husband, for she had begun to see that he had carried pride to the point of folly, and all her hopes, all her dreams, all her ambitions were centred upon her darling boy. Her ambitions were not worldly. She knew nothing at all about the world, and did not believe three parts of what she heard of it. Only she longed for him to escape the bitterness and bareness that had been her portion. The boy was so beautiful and could be so gay and could dance so lightly, and would sometimes be so tempestuous and masterful. It would be a sin if he were to be cramped over a board or were sent to work in a tailoring shop. She herself had a love of flowers and of moonlight and the stars shining through the smoky sky, and she would sometimes find herself being urged to the use of strange words, which would make Mendel raise his head and cock his ears as though he were listening to the very beat of her heart. To that no one in the world had ever listened, and her life seemed very full and worthy when Mendel in his childish fashion was awake to it. . . . Pentonville seemed to suit Jacob. He looked almost fat and said the cocoa was very good.

The time came for Mendel to leave school and Issy said he had better be taken into the workshop. Harry wanted him in the timber-yard in which he loafed away his days. Abramovich was for getting Mr. Jacobson to take him into his office, for Mr. Jacobson never failed to ask after the boy who painted the pictures. Now it so happened that Mendel had found a bookshop, outside which he had discovered a life of W. P. Frith, R.A. In daily visits over a period of three weeks he had read it from cover to cover, the story of a poor boy who had become an artist, rising to such fame that he had painted the portrait of the Queen. There it was in print, and must be true. Mr. Jacobson's boy was only in a story, but here it was set down in a book, with reproductions of the artist's wonderful pictures--"The Railway Station," "Derby Day." The book said they were wonderful. The book spoke with reverence and enthusiasm of pictures and the men who painted them.

With tremulous excitement he secretly produced his box of paints again, and squeezed out the colours on to the plate he used for a palette. He adored the colours and amused himself with painting smooth strips of blue, yellow, green, red, orange, grey, for the sheer delight of handling the delicious stuff. It was a new pleasure, the joy of colours in themselves without reference to any object, or any feeling inside himself except this simple thrilling delight. He could forget everything in it, for it was his first taste of childish glee. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing could ever again so oppress and overwhelm him as distasteful and even pleasant things had done in the past. He would be an artist, a wonderful artist, like W. P. Frith, R.A.

So when he was called into the kitchen one night and they told him he was to go into Mr. Jacobson's office, he looked as though their words had no meaning for him, and he said:--

"I want to be an artist."

An artist? Nobody knew quite what that meant. Golda thought it meant painting pictures, but she could not imagine a man devoting all his time to it--a child's pastime.

"He means the drawing!" said Abramovich. "I had a friend at home who used to paint the flowers on the cups."

"I'm going to be an artist," said Mendel.

"But you've got to make your money like everybody else," replied Issy.

Mendel retorted with details of what he could remember of the career of his idol. Issy said that was a _Christlicher kop._ There weren't such things as Jewish artists; whereon Harry threw in the word "Rubinstein." Asked to explain what he meant, he did not know, but had just remembered the name.

Abramovich said he thought Rubinstein was a conductor at the Opera, and there were Jewish singers and actors.

"My father," said Harry, "won't hear of that. He won't have a son of his making a public show of himself."

Mendel by this time was white in the face, and his eyes were glaring out of his head. He knew that not one of them had understood his meaning, and he felt that Issy was bent on having his way with him. He was in despair at his helplessness, and at last, when he could endure no more, he flung himself down on the floor and howled. Issy lost his temper with him, picked him up, and carried him, kicking and biting, upstairs, and flung him on his bed.

The subject was dropped for a time, but Mendel refused to eat, or to sleep, or to leave the house. He was afraid that if he put his nose outside the door Abramovich would pounce on him and drag him off to Mr. Jacobson's office.

However, the matter could not be postponed for long, because money was very scarce and the boy must be put into the way of providing for himself. Golda asked Abramovich to find out what an artist was and how much a week could be made at the trade. Abramovich came in one evening with a note-book full of facts and figures. He had read of a picture being sold for tens of thousands of pounds, and this had made a great impression on him. Mendel was called down from the room in which he had exiled himself.

"Well?" said Abramovich kindly. "So you want to be an artist? But how?"

"I don't know. I shall paint pictures."

"But who will feed you? Who will buy you paints, brushes?"

"I shall sell my pictures."

"Where, then? How?"

"To the shops."

"Where are the shops? Tell me of any shop near here, for I don't know a single one."

Again Mendel felt that they were too clever for him, and he was on the brink of another fit of despair when, fortunately for him, Mr. Macalister, a commercial traveller in furs, came in. When he was in London he made a point of calling on the Kühlers, whom he liked, much as he liked strong drink. He was a man of some attainments, a student of Edinburgh, who had found the ordinary walks and the ordinary people of life too tame for his chaotic and vigorous temper, and he went from place to place collecting just such strange people as these Polacks, as he used to call them. He looked for passion in men and women, and accepted it gratefully and even greedily wherever he found it. . . . He had red hair and a complexion like a white-heart cherry, with little twinkling eyes as blue as forget-me-nots.

He kindled at once to the passion with which Mendel was bursting, stooped over Golda's hand and kissed it--for he knew that was how foreigners greeted a lady--and then he sat heavily waiting for the situation to be explained to him. Mendel instinctively appealed to him. . . . Oh yes! he knew what an artist was, and some painters had made tidy fortunes, though they were not the best of them. There were Reynolds, and Lawrence, and Raeburn, and Landseer, and some young fellows at Glasgow, and Michael Angelo--a tidy lot, indeed. Never a Jew, that he had heard of.

"I told you so!" said Abramovich.

Golda showed Mr. Macalister the boy's pictures, and he was genuinely impressed, especially by a picture of three oranges in a basket.

"It's not," he said, "that they make you want to eat them, as that they make you look at them as you look at oranges. I'll look closer at every orange I see now. That's talent. Yes. That's talent. Aye."

Mendel was so grateful to him that he forgot the others and began to point out to him how well the oranges were painted, with all their fleshiness and rotundity brought out. And very soon they were all laughing at him, and that made the meeting happier.

Mr. Macalister explained that in old days artists used to take boys into their studios, but that now there were Schools of Art where only very talented people could survive. He certainly thought that Mendel ought to be given a chance, and if it were a question of money, he, poor though he was, would be only too glad to help. Golda would not hear of that, and Abramovich protested that, in an unhappy time like this, he regarded himself as the representative of his unfortunate friend.

The corner was turned. Feeling was now all with Mendel, and he went to bed singing in head and heart: "I'm an artist! I'm an artist! I'm an artist!"

* * * * *

So the ball was set rolling. Jacob, seen behind the bars, raised no objection. He had had time to think, and, to the extent of his capacity, availed himself of it. When he was told that his youngest son wanted to be an artist and wept at the suggestion of anything else, he thought: "Who am I to say 'Yea' or 'Nay'?" and he said "Yea." "Let the boy have a little happiness while he may, for the Christians are very powerful and will take all that he cherishes from him."

The question of ways and means was considered, and here Abe Moscowitsch took charge. His business had prospered during his enforced absence, and his bankruptcy had been very profitable. He was a decent man, and anxious to make amends to his young wife and her family for the trouble his adventurousness had brought on them. To please her he took a new house with bow-windows and a garage, and to please them he jumped at the opportunity of helping Mendel, and offered to pay his fees at a School of Art. When the boy heard this he ran to his brother-in-law's office and, before all his workmen, flung his arms round his neck and embraced him.

"That'll do. That'll do," said Moscowitsch. "Don't forget us if you're a rich man before I am."

"I shall never leave home," said Mendel. "I shall never marry. I shall live all my days with my mother, painting."

There arose the difficulty that no one had ever heard of a School of Art. Mr. Macalister was deputed to look into the matter. He inquired, and was recommended to the Polytechnic as being cheap and good, and the Polytechnic was decided on.

Mr. Kuit came in at the tail of all this excitement, and added to it by saying that he was just off to America, first-class by the Cunard Line, for he was going to start in style, live in style, and come back in style. He was delighted to hear of the brilliant future opening up before Mendel, and told wonderful stories of famous pictures that had been stolen, cut out of their frames and taken away under the very noses of the owners. He was wonderfully overdressed, not loudly or vulgarly, but through his eagerness to be and to look first-class. He produced a pack of cards and showed how he could shuffle them to suit himself, and three times out of five, through the fineness of the touch, he could "spot" a card. He was a wonderful man. The Kühlers gaped at him, and Moscowitsch, in emulation, was led on to brag of his smartness in business, and how he had thrice burned down his timber-yard and made the insurance people pay up. Yet, though he warmed up as he boasted, he lacked the magic of Mr. Kuit and could not conceal the meanness of his deeds behind their glamour. He lumbered along like a great bear behind Mr. Kuit, and was vexed because he could not overtake him, and when the glittering little Jew, who seemed more magician than thief, said he would give Mendel a new suit of clothes for his entry into the world of art, Moscowitsch promised to provide a new pair of boots. Mr. Kuit countered with two new hats, Moscowitsch with underclothes. On they went in competition until Mendel was magnificently equipped, and at last Moscowitsch laid two new sovereigns on the table and said they were for the boy's pocket-money. Not to be outdone, Mr. Kuit produced a five-pound note and gave it to Golda to be put into the Post Office Savings Bank.

In her inmost heart Golda was alarmed. For the first time she began to realize the vast powerful London with which she was surrounded. At home, in Austria, people stole because they were poor, because they were starving. She herself had often sent Harry and Issy out into the market with a sack and a spiked stick with which to pick up potatoes and cabbages and bread, but here the old simplicity was lacking. The swagger and the magnitude of Mr. Kuit's operations and her son-in-law's frauds alarmed her, and she felt that no good could come of it. They belonged to some power which moved too fast for her, and it was being invoked for Mendel, her youngest-born, her treasure. Truly it was a black day that took Jacob from her. Where he was, there was simplicity. Everything was kept in its place when he was in authority. Everything was kept down on the earth. There was the good smell of the earth in all his dealings, all his emotions. Never in him was the easy fantastic excitement of Kuit and Moscowitsch . . . They were mad. Surely they were mad. Their excitement infected everybody. Golda could feel it creeping in her veins like a poison. It came from the world to which these men belonged, the world of prison. That one word expressed it all for Golda. She had only been out into it to go to the prison, and to her that seemed to be the cold empty centre of it all. The bustle and glitter of the streets led to the prison, and she had always to fight to get back into her own life, where things were simple and definite--ugly, maybe--but clear and actual. . . . And now into that world of hectic excitement playing about the prison and about Mendel was to go, to be she knew not what, to learn to play with brushes and colours, to practise tricks which seemed to her not essentially different from Mr. Kuit's sleight with the cards. She was sure no good could come of it; but for the present the boy had his happiness, and to that she yielded.

IV

FIRST LOVE

FOR Mendel every day became romantic, though he suffered tortures of shyness and used to bolt like a rabbit through the doors of the Polytechnic, rush upstairs to his easel, and never raise his eyes from it except to gaze at the objects placed before him. He worked in a frenzy, convinced that it was his business to translate the object on to the canvas. When he had done that he felt that the object had no further existence. It ought to vanish as completely as his consuming interest in it. As a matter of fact, it never did vanish, but it was lost in the praises of Mr. Sivwright, and the young women and old ladies who attended the class. The first task set the class after he joined it was a ginger-beer bottle, of which his rendering was declared to be a marvel, even to the high light on the marble in the neck of the bottle.

He was rather small for his age and was almost absurdly beautiful, with his curly hair, round Austrian head, and amusing pricked ears. His eyes were set very wide apart. They were blue. His nose was straight, and very slightly tip-tilted, and his lips were as delicately modelled as the petals of a rose. They were always tremulous as he shrank under the vivid impressions that poured in on him in bewildering profusion. He began to grow physically and spiritually, though not at all mentally, and he lived in a state of bewilderment, retaining shrewdness enough to cling to the necessary plain fact that he was at the school to be a success, for if he failed he would sink back into the already detestable world inhabited by Issy and Harry.

He created quite a stir at the school. Mr. Sivwright, a Lancashire Scotsman, whose youthful revolt against commerce and grime had carried him in the direction of art only so far as the municipal school, said he was an infant prodigy and made a show of him. To Mendel's disgust Mr. Sivwright assured the other pupils that he was a Pole. This was his first intimation that there was, in the splendid free Christian world, a prejudice against Jews. He was rather shocked and disgusted, for never in his life had he found occasion to call anything by other than its right name. It took him weeks to conquer his shyness sufficiently to protest.

"I am a Jew," he said to Mr. Sivwright. "Why do you call me a Pole?"

"Well," said Mr. Sivwright, "there's Chopin, you know, and Paderewski, don't you know, and Kosciusko, and the Jews don't stand for anything but money. And, after all, you do come from Poland."

"But I am a Jew."

"You don't look it, and there's some swing about being a Pole. There's no swing about being a Jew. It stops dead, you know. I don't know why it is, but it stops dead."

The words frightened Mendel. How awful it would be if he were to stop dead, to reach the Polytechnic and to go no further!

He was soon taken beyond the Polytechnic, for Mr. Sivwright led him to the National Gallery and showed him the treasures there. The boy was at once prostrate before Greuze. Ah! there were softness, tenderness, charm: all that he had lacked and longed for. It was in vain that Mr. Sivwright took him to the Van Eycks and the Teniers and the Franz Hals, striking an attitude and saying: "Fine! Dramatic! That's the real stuff!" The boy would return to his Greuze and pour out on the pretty maidens all the longings for emotion with which he was filled, and the yearning seemed to him to be the irresistible torrent of art which carried those who felt it to the pinnacles of fame. . . . Yet he knew that Mr. Sivwright was a shoddy failure of a man, and he knew that Mr. Sivwright's ecstasies were forced and had small connection with the pictures before him. He also knew that he had not the least desire to paint like Greuze, but he could not resist the fascination of the pretty maidens and the gush of feeling he had in front of them. The Italians he did not understand and Velasquez and El Greco repelled him. Also, the pictures as a whole excited him so that they ran into each other and he could not extricate them, and Greuze became his stand-by. He felt safe with Greuze.

Every day he used to go home and tell his mother of the day's doings, from the moment when he mounted the bus in the morning to the time when he walked home in the evening. He gave her minute accounts of all the people in the class, of the cheap restaurant where he had lunch, of the marvels of the streets: the old women selling flowers at Oxford Circus; the gorgeous shop-windows; the illuminated signs and advertisements, green, red, and yellow; the theatres; the posters of the comic men outside the music-halls; the rich people in their motor-cars; the marvellous ladies in their silks and their furs; the poor men selling matches; the scarlet soldiers and blue sailors; the big policemen who stopped the traffic with their white hands; the awful, endless desolation of Portland Place, with trees--actually trees--at the end of it; the whirl, the glitter, the roar, the splendour of London. And he used to mimic for her the strange people he saw, the mincing ladies and the lordly shopwalkers, the tittering girls and the men working in the streets. The more excited he was the more depressed was Golda. What was it all for? Why could not people live a decent quiet life? Why was all this whirligig revolving round the prison? . . . But she smiled and laughed and applauded him, and believed him when he said none of the Christians could draw as well as he.

He began to win prizes. It became his whole object to beat the Christians. What they told him to paint he would paint better than any of them. And by sheer will and concentration he succeeded.

Mr. Sivwright said there was no holding him, and very soon declared he had nothing more to learn.

This was taken by Mendel and his family to mean that he was now an artist. In all good faith he established himself in a room below the workshop at home, called it his studio, and set to work. For a few months he painted apples, fish, oranges, portraits of his mother, brothers, and sisters, and for a time was able to sell them among his acquaintance. He had one or two commissions for portraits and could always make a few shillings by painting from photographs. But appreciation of art among his own people was limited; he soon came to an end of it, and there was that other world calling to him. Art lay beyond that other world. He felt sure of that. It lay beyond Mr. Sivwright. If he stayed among his own people he would stop dead; for he knew now that it was true that the Jews stopped dead.

And then to his horror he stopped. For no reason at all his skill, his enthusiasm, his eagerness left him. He forced himself to paint, transferred innumerable idiotic faces from photographs to cigar-box lids, made his mother neglect her work to sit to him, bribed Lotte to be his model, but hated and loathed everything that he did. He was listless, sometimes feverish, sometimes leaden and cold. Often he thought he was going to die--to die before anything had happened, before anything had emerged from the chaos of his painful vivid impressions.

To make things worse, his father came home and said that he would give him six months in which to make his living, and at the end of that time, if he had failed, he would have to go into the workshop.

He felt hopeless. He went to see Mr. Sivwright and poured out his woes to him, who wrote a letter to Jacob saying that his son was a genius and would be one of the greatest of painters. Jacob said: "What is a genius? I do not know. I know what a man is, and a man works for his living. In six months, if you can make fifteen shillings a week I will believe in this painting. If not, what is there to believe? What will you do when you are to marry, heh? Tell me that. Will your little tubes of paint keep a wife, heh? Tell me that."

Mendel could say nothing. He could do nothing. He gave up even trying to paint, for he might as well have played with mud-pies. He borrowed money from his brothers and prowled about the streets, and went to the National Gallery. Greuze meant nothing to him now. He began to feel, very faintly, the force of Michael Angelo, but the rest only filled him with despair. He knew nothing--nothing at all. He could not even begin to see how the pictures were painted. They were miraculous and detestable. . . . He went home and comforted himself with a little picture of some apples on a plate. He had painted it two years before in an ecstasy--a thrilling love for the form, the colour, the texture of the fruit and the china. It was good. He knew it was good, but he knew he could do nothing like it now--never again, perhaps.

And how disgusting the streets had become! Such a litter, such a noise, such aimless, ugly people! He could understand his mother's horror of them. Ah! she never failed him. To her his words were always music, his presence was always light. Half-dead and miserable as he was, she could know and love the aching heart of him that lived so furiously behind all the death and the misery and the ashes of young hopes that crusted him. She was like the sky and the trees. She was like the young grass springing and waving so delicately in the wind. She was like the water and the rolling hills. . . . He had discovered these things at Hampstead, whither he had gone out of sheer aimlessness. He had never been in the Tube, and one day, with a shilling borrowed from Harry, it seemed appropriate to him to plunge into the bowels of the earth. The oppression of the air, the roar of the train, the flash of the stations as he moved through them, suited his mood, fantastic and futile. He got out at Hampstead.

It was his first sight of the country. He could hardly move at first for emotion. He found himself laughing, and he stooped and touched the grass tenderly, almost timidly, as though he were afraid of hurting it. He was fearful at first of walking on it, but that seemed to him childish, and he strode along with his quick, light-footed stride and lost himself in the willow groves. He made a posy of wild-flowers and took them back to his mother, carrying them unashamedly in his hand, entirely oblivious of the smiles of the passers-by. He knew he could not tell his mother of the happiness of that day, and the flowers could say more than any words.

Yet the happiness only made his misery more acute. He suffered terribly from the pious narrowness of his home, the restricted, cramped life of his brothers and sisters, who seemed to him to be stealing such life as they had from the religious observances to which they were bound by their father's rigid will. Prayers at home, prayers in the synagogue: the dreadful monotony of the home, of the talk, of the squabbles: human life forced to be as dull as that of the God who no longer interfered in human life. . . . There was a tragedy in the street. There had been a scandal. A young Rabbi, a gloriously handsome creature, who sang in the synagogue, had fallen in love with a little girl of fourteen who lived opposite the Kühlers. Golda had watched the intrigue from her windows, and she said it was the girl's fault. The Rabbi used to go every day when her father was out and she used to let him in. Jacob wrote to the girl's father, and the Rabbi left his lodgings and took a room over a little restaurant round the corner. He had his dinner and went upstairs and sat up all night singing, in his lovely tenor voice, love songs and religious chants, so sweetly that the neighbours threw their windows open and there was a little crowd of people in the street listening. And in the morning they found him with his throat cut.

"It was the girl's fault," said Golda, but Jacob said: "A man should know better than to melt when a little girl practises her eyes on him."

This tragedy relaxed the nervous strain which had been set up in Mendel by his troubles. New forces stirred in him which often made him hectic and light-headed. Women changed their character for him. They were no longer soothing ministrants, but creatures charged with a mysterious, a maddening charm. He trembled at the rustle of their skirts and his eyes were held riveted by their movements. He was suffocated by his new curiosity about them.

Sometimes, in his despair over his painting and the apparently complete disappearance of his talent, he would fill in the day in his father's workshop, stretching rabbit-skins on a board. Girls and men worked together, busily, quietly, dexterously, for the most part in silence, for they were paid by the piece and were unwilling to waste time. There was a girl who had just been taken into the workshop to learn the trade. She was small and plump and swarthy, but her face was beautiful, the colour of rich old ivory. Her eyes were black and golden from a ruddy tinge in her eyelashes. Her lips were full and pouting, and she had long blue-black hair, which she was always tossing back over her shoulder. When Mendel was there she rarely took her eyes off him, and even when her head was bent he could feel that she was watching him.

He waited for her one evening, and with his knees almost knocking together he asked if she would come to his studio and let him draw her. With a silly giggle she said she would come, and she ran away before he could get out another word.

The next evening he waited in his studio for her, but she did not come. So again the next and the next, and it was a whole week before she knocked at the door. He pulled her in. Neither could speak a word. At last he stammered out:

"I--I haven't got my drawing things ready."

"I don't mind," she said, and she gave a little shiver.

"Are you cold?" he asked, and he touched her neck.

She threw up her head, seemed to fall towards him, and their lips met.

Thrilling and sweet were the hours they spent, lost in the miracle of desire, finding themselves again, laughing happily, weeping happily, breaking through into the enchanted world, where the few words that either knew had lost their meaning. They were hardly conscious of each other. They knew nothing of each other, and wished to know nothing except the lovely mystery they shared. It was some time before he even knew her name, or where she lived, or what her people were. She existed for him only in the enchantment she brought into his life, in the release from his burden, in the marvellous free life of the body. Royal he felt, like a king, like a master, and she was a willing slave. From home she would steal good things to eat, and she would sit with shining eyes watching him eat; and then she would wait until he had need of her. . . . Strange, silent, happy hours they spent, free together in the dark little room, free as birds in their nest, happy in warm contact, utterly quiescent, utterly oblivious. . . .

Soon their silence became oppressive to them, but neither could break it, so far beyond their years and their childish minds was the experience in which they were joined. When the first ecstasy passed and they became conscious and deliberate in their delight, they had unhappy moments, to escape from which he began to draw her. Into this work poured a strong cool passion altogether new to him, a joy so magnificent that he would forget her altogether. He was tyrannical, and kept her so still that she would almost weep from fatigue and boredom. But he was not satisfied until he had drawn every line of her, and had translated her from the world of the body to the world of vision and the spirit. He knew nothing of that. He was only concerned to draw her as he had drawn the ginger-beer bottle at the Polytechnic. Certain parts of her body--her little budding breasts and her round arms--especially delighted him, and he drew them over and over again. Her head he drew twenty times, and he found a shop in the West End where he could sell every one. And each time he bought her a little present.

She was not satisfied with that. She wanted to display him to her friends. She wanted him to take her to music-halls and to join the parade of boys and girls. He refused. That would be profanation. He and she had nothing to do with the world. He and she were the world. Outside it was only his drawing. He could not see that she was unable to share it. Did he not draw her? Did he dream of drawing anything but her? . . . . To go from that to restaurants, the lascivious pleasantries of the streets, the garish music-halls, was to him unthinkable.

She said he cared more for his drawing than for her, and indeed he would sometimes draw for a couple of hours and then kiss her almost absent-mindedly, just as she was going. He was so happy and satisfied and could not imagine her being anything less, or that she might wish to express in music-halls and "fun" what he expressed in his work.

He felt gloriously confident, and naïvely told his mother how happy he was. Everything had come back. He could draw better than ever. He would be a great artist.

Once more he took to painting in the kitchen. The studio was dedicated to the girl, Sara, who came to him in spite of her disappointment. He had spoiled her for other boys.

He painted all day long in the kitchen, and his life became ordered and regular. He went for a walk in the morning, then worked all day long until the workpeople began to clatter downstairs, when he would pack up his paint-box and run up to the studio to wait for Sara to come tapping softly at his door.

Golda was overjoyed at his new happiness and the budding manhood in him, but she knew that this springtime of his youth could not be without a cause. She knew that he was in love and was fearful of consequences, and dreaded his being fatally entangled. She kept watch and saw Sara stealthily leave the house hours after the other workpeople had gone. She told Jacob, and Sara was dismissed and forbidden ever to come near the house again.

V

A TURNING-POINT

AT first Mendel hardly noticed the passing of Sara. He waited anxiously for her to come, but when she never appeared he went on working, only gradually to discover that the first glorious impulse had faded away. However, the habit of regular work was strong with him, and he could go on like a carpenter or a mason or any other good journeyman. But there was no one to buy what he produced, and his father began to talk gloomily and ominously of the workshop.

"Never!" said Mendel. "If I am not a great artist by the time I am twenty-three I will come and work. If I have done nothing by the time I am twenty-three I shall know that I am no good."

"I can see no reason," said Jacob, "why you should not work like any other man and paint in your spare time. Issy is a good dancer in his spare time, and Harry is good at the boxing. Why should you not paint in your spare time and work like an honest man?"

Mendel turned on his father and rent him.

"You do not know what work is. You work with your hands. Yes. But do you ever work till your head swims, and your eyes ache because they can see more inside than they can outside? If I cannot paint I shall die. I shall be like a bird that cannot sing, like a woman that has no child, like a man that has no strength. I tell you I shall die if I cannot paint."

"Yes, he will die," said Golda. "He will surely die."

"He will die of starvation if he goes on painting," replied Jacob.

"And if you had not been able to sleep you would have died of starvation for all that work ever did for you," cried Golda, convinced that Mendel was speaking the truth.

Shortly before this crisis Mendel had discovered a further aspect of the Christian world. A good young man from an Oxford settlement had heard of him and had sought him out. This young man's name was Edward Tufnell. He was the son of a rich Northern manufacturer, and he believed that the cultured classes owed something to the masses. He believed there must be mute, inglorious Miltons in the slums, and that they only needed fertilization. When, therefore, he heard of the poor boy who sat in his mother's kitchen painting oranges and fish and onions, he was excited to bring the prodigy within reach of culture. He made him attend lectures on poetry and French classes. These duties gave Mendel a good excuse for escaping from home in the evenings, and he attended the classes, but hardly understood a word of what was said. He liked and admired Edward Tufnell, who was very nearly what he imagined a gentleman to be--generous and kind, and quick to appreciate the human quality of any fellow-creature, no matter what his outward aspect might be. Edward Tufnell treated Golda exactly as he would have treated an elderly duchess.

To Edward Tufnell, therefore, Mendel bore his difficulty, and Edward took infinite pains and at last, through his interest with the Bishop of Stepney, procured him a situation in a stained-glass factory, where he was set to trace cartoons of the Virgin Mary and S. John the Baptist and other figures of whom he had never heard. But, though he had never heard of them, yet he understood that they were figures worthy of respect, and it shocked him to hear the workmen say: "Billy, chuck us down another Mary," or "Jack, heave up that there J. C. . . ." He was acutely miserable. To draw without impulse or delight was torture to him, and he could not put pencil to paper without a thrill of eagerness and desire, which was immediately baffled when his pencil had to follow out the conventional lines of the stained-glass windows. And the draughtsmen with whom he worked were empty, foul-mouthed men, who seemed to strive to give the impression that they lived only for the mean pleasures of the flesh. They knew nothing, nothing at all, and he hated them.

He was paid five shillings a week, and was told that if he behaved himself, by the time he was twenty or twenty-one he would be making thirty shillings a week. Jacob was very pleased with this prospect, and told his unhappy son that he would soon settle down to it, and he even began to upbraid him for not painting in the evenings. Mendel could not touch his brushes. He tried hard to think of himself as an ordinary working boy, and he endeavoured to pursue the pleasures of his kind. He went with Harry to boxing matches and joined him in the raffish pleasures of the streets, which, however, left him weary and disgusted. He had known something truer and finer, and he could not help a little despising Harry, who pursued girls as game, and directly they were kindled and moved towards him he lost interest in them, and, indeed, was rather horrified by them.

Strange in contrast was Mendel's relation with Edward Tufnell, who was entirely innocent and could see nothing in his protégé but a touching sensitiveness to beauty. The urchin with his complete and unoffended knowledge of the life of the gutter was hidden from him. Edward found, and was rejoiced to find, that the boy was sensitive to intellectual beauty and to ideas. He gave him poetry to read--Keats and the odes of Milton--and was very happy to explain to him the outlines of Christianity and the difference that the coming of Christ had made to the world. He did not aim at making a convert, but only at feeding the boy's appetite for tenderness and kindness and all fair things. Mendel was striving most loyally to be resigned to his horrible fate, and the teachings of Christ seemed to fortify his endeavour. When, therefore, he asked if he might read the New Testament, Edward lent it to him without misgiving.

The result was disastrous. Mendel pored over the book and it seemed to let light into his darkness. He read of the conversion of S. Paul and his own illumination was apparently no less complete. The notion of holding out the other cheek appealed to him, for he felt that the whole world was his enemy. It had insulted him with five shillings a week, and if he were meek it would presently add another five. . . . And then what a prospect it opened up of a world where people loved each other and treated each other kindly and lived without the rasping anger and suspicion and jealousy that filled his home.

He went to the National Gallery and began to understand the Italians. He would become a Christian and paint Madonnas, mothers suckling their children, with kindly saints like Edward Tufnell looking on. Yet the new spirituality jarred with his life at home and was not strong enough to combat it. That life contained a quality as essential to him as air. It stank in his nostrils, but it was the food of his spirit and he could not, though his new enthusiasm bade him do it, sentimentalize his relation with his mother. Her relation with his father forbade it, and his father cast a shadow over the greater life illuminated by the figure of Christ. Yet because of the pictures he could not abandon the struggle, and he tried to find support by proselytizing Harry. That roisterer had begun to find his life very unsatisfying, and he gulped down the new idea simply because it was new. He got drunk on it, refused to go to the synagogue, and performed a number of acts that he thought Christian, as wasting his money on useless and hideous presents for his mother and sisters. Also he took a delight in talking of the Messiah, and ascribed all the misfortunes of the family to its adherence to an exploded faith.

Jacob was furious. This soft Christian nonsense was revolting to him.